I’ve been moved over to DreamHost for a total of… three minutes. If you’re interested, here’s what I did:
1. First I logged into my domain via GoDaddy’s SSH, I zip’d all of my files as allfiles.zip via the command zip -r allfiles.zip * This command says to zip (* means wildcard, so everything), the -r means to get subfolders, and the filename allfiles.zip tells it where to put the zip’d files.
2. All said and done that took less than a minute to do, but to transfer the 400MB files took about five minutes.
3. Then I had to login to DreamHost (they provided me with a temporary *.dreamhost.com address to do this, for free) and upload the allfiles.zip, which took just under an hour–so I then went to sleep.
4. This morning I found that bradarsenault.com has finally propagated through the inter-tubes to point to DreamHost, so I logged into bradarsenault.com via SSH and simply did the command unzip allfiles.zip. This took a few seconds and voila-all of my data is now at DreamHost.
5. Databases, I backed up my database last night at GoDaddy and downloaded it (via FTP) this morning. I then created a database at dreamhost with the same name (I know, Steve Gibson, but the passwords and names are REALLY long). From there, I simply chose the import button, uploaded the database.
6. Finally I had to edit the wp-config.php file to point to the new database.
So far, from what I can tell, DreamHost is much faster than GoDaddy, the load averages on my server are a lot lower, and everything feels snap-tastic.